The Waking of a Nation

The Waking of a Nation

On 13 April 1919, a British army officer, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, ordered his troops to shoot at a crowd of unarmed and peaceful Indians that had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar to protest against the Rowlatt Act. The firing lasted for roughly five minutes, during which 1,650 rounds were fired. The number of casualties is still debated, but the British Government later accepted that nearly 400 Indians had been killed in the shooting. A textbook example of the tyranny of the British Raj, the Amritsar Massacre – later known as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre – became a watershed moment in India’s freedom movement, galvanizing the entire nation to rise against its colonial master and setting India’s struggle for independence in motion. The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh caused such public outrage that the British Government was compelled to set up the Disorders Inquiry Committee to investigate the incident. The findings of the inquiry divided the Commission along racial lines, with its British members refusing to view the massacre as a symptom of systemic racialism, while its Indian members insisted that race relations and white supremacy lay at the core of the violence. The Hunter Commission’s report singularly blamed Brigadier-General Dyer for the massacre, and as a consequence, the general was stripped of his rank and asked to resign. But what led General Dyer to march into Jallianwala Bagh and execute such a heinous crime?

Director

Ram Madhvani

Release

7 Mar 2025